Increase Digital Marketing Success by Reaching Niche Markets

The natural growth pattern of a business is based on its size, location, and business model. What you sell, the demand for that product or service, and how many customers you can effectively serve in a day all come together to form a relatively predictable pace of growth.

Of course, every business is unique and your true growth rate is also based on personal success as well as factors like customer referral rates and efficiency techniques.

Business growth is always ultimately limited by the number of people who can and will use your product, especially for local venues like shops, local services or gyms. But what if we told you there was a way to as much as double your target audience with a few simple steps?

Niche market customers, outliers with special needs or concerns, are a larger group than most businesses give them credit for.

Consider how you can match your knowledge, service or product offering to a particular audience.

There’s no doubt you could boost your business and growth potential simply by being considerate of and marketing to the niche groups that exist in any place in the world because of the Internet and social media. But you need to be consistent.

What is a Niche Market?

Niche markets are created when a significantly large group of customers has a specific need, interest, or desire that isn’t considered ‘mainstream’.

Technically, this can be anything that makes a group unique and it doesn’t have to be a small group in order to count as a niche, simply separate from the majority. Niches can be broadly drawn like ‘marketers’ or much more tightly defined and separated into groups like ‘marketing professionals in the public sector’ – who are my niche market.

This means that you can find a niche absolutely anywhere and your large target audience definitely includes a few sub-categories that could be more effectively marketed to by identifying their niche desires. So, in my case, it’s marketing professionals working in policing, politics and public policy.

Identifying Niche Markets for Your Business

If you want to quickly grow your business by catering to profitable and available niches, your first step is to identify the niches your products and services could benefit, along with the costs and potential returns for catering to each niche you identify.

A good place to start is a brainstorming session with members of your team members to come up with a large number of creative ways your product could be used outside what you’re already advertising for.

You can also start from the other direction by identifying population niches and asking yourself how your product could benefit them. Every product and market has many available niches if you teach yourself how to look for them.

Ask yourself and your brainstorming team what niches you and they belong to and how your individual needs or desires shape your buying habits to give yourself a perspective to start with.

You can then follow up by doing research on known niches for your industry and how they are being addressed by other companies.

This will create a good baseline to start expanding your marketing tactics and increasing your potential for growth.

Catering to Your Niche Markets

How you integrate your chosen niche markets into your current marketing efforts will depend on a combination of factors.

How large the niche is, how much business you can expect from them, and whether or not they could benefit from minor changes in the product all play a part. That said, your first step should always be to create a new buyer persona for your marketing team to work with.

Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your target audience and most companies have at least one or two. For your locator key ring product, mainstream buyer personas might include a busy working person or parents with children who move things.

New buyer personas might include a visually impaired person who uses the beeps to find their keys more efficiently, a dog owner who uses the map feature to track their escape-artist pet, or even parents of small children who tend to run off in stores.

Once you have your new buyer personas, set your marketing team to create new niche-specific campaigns to target your new audience.

If it fits well, you can also integrate the new buyer personas into existing ad campaigns which will create a comprehensive and blended marketing effort.

The new tactics can include commercials and promotional images that feature your new personas, inbound marketing content that addresses their concerns, and even outreach efforts to actively introduce your product to your chosen niche markets.

You can even make a special marketing campaign simply announce your marketing shift and publicly welcome the new niche customers to your brand.

If your initial marketing efforts toward your chosen niches are successful, it may be worthwhile to consider producing niche-specific variations of your product that appeal more directly to your niche customers.

Pet owners, for instance, will be enticed by tags with paw-prints on them and perhaps a slot for an emergency contact card.

A variety of bright colours or belt-loops instead of a key chain hole may appeal more to parents of small children.

Whatever changes you make, simply ensure that either the new design is fairly universally appealing or that the target niche market is responsive enough to ensure returns.

Growing with Your Niches

One of the wonderful things about building niche market customers is that as you grow, you gain access to more members of your already targeted niches.

In many cases, niches have online communities in which they recommend the best companies that cater to their needs meaning that as you successfully cater to niches, the number of new customers through referrals may skyrocket.

New locations, greater service areas, and an online presence will open up access not just to mainstream customers, but a larger audience in your niche markets as well.

Likewise, if a niche market you cater to grows significantly, so too does your customer base.

A large number of pet adoptions, babies born, or new residents moving into town can change local demographics while significant shifts in the online business community can make a big difference for B2B and web-based companies. If you’re watching out for these changes, you can be prepared to take advantage of them.

Which niches you target, how you market to them, and their response to your efforts will have an undeniable effect on your company’s growth.

Niche markets bring you more customers who are uniquely interested in your targeted products.

While you may have had a certain timetable for growth and expansion with only your mainstream market, by increasing your niche market targeting you have multiplied your potential customer pool, provided more personalised marketing efforts, and significantly bolstered your potential for growth.

Joanne is a digital marketing and social media consultant, trainer and international speaker. She is currently working on her second social media book and holds 11 professional and academic qualifications, including a Masters Degree in Journalism and a Masters Degree in Digital Marketing. Joanne loves to empower her clients with knowledge and skills to equip them in the digital age. Be sure to follow her tweets @tweetsbyJSB.